Live Not by Lies Even When You’re Winning

In 2020 Rod Dreher published Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, in which he commends those saints and martyrs who refused to fall in line with the Soviet totalitarian regime. His title comes from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous tract of the same name, which the Russian novelist published after his 1974 exile from Russia. Drawing lessons from those who experienced oppression under Soviet rule, Dreher argues that Americans are under an analogous threat of “soft totalitarianism” predicated by the Left. Christians and social conservatives need to be on guard against ideologies hostile to their faith purveyed not so much through government coercion as through the “soft” forms of cultural power and influence. Merely going with the flow will no longer suffice. Those who don’t actively resist this soft totalitarianism may “think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him,” Dreher writes. “Each of us thinks we wouldn’t be like that. But if we have accepted the lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble.” Encouraged by this framing, the majority of Dreher’s readers have seen themselves as insurgents against the influential elite.